


When You're Alyssa Greene

by slightlykylie



Category: The Prom - Sklar/Beguelin/Martin
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:27:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28145331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightlykylie/pseuds/slightlykylie
Summary: Not for the first time, it occurs to Alyssa that going to Mass feels a lot like hooking up with those guys she dated before she found Emma -- something that works for some people, so she's told, but definitely not for her.
Relationships: Alyssa Greene/Emma Nolan
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	When You're Alyssa Greene

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mierke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mierke/gifts).



The kneelers in the lower church are hard and dark green, covered in vinyl instead of plush. Alyssa presses her forehead to her steepled fingers, keeping her elbows propped on the pew in front of her as subtly as she can. Her skirt, wine-red and precisely knee-length, just brushes the kneeler, screening her sore knees from view. She closes her eyes and tries to focus her attention on the words of the Mass, hoping maybe she’ll luck out and find God this time; she could use the guidance. _Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts; Heaven and earth are full of your glory; Hosanna in the highest –_ what is “Hosanna,” anyway? Some kind of word of praise, she supposes, but what exactly? In Lent it’s the word they sub in where they’d ordinarily say “Alleluia”, because “Alleluia” is too joyful for Lent. What does that make “Hosanna” – holy, but without the happiness? Has anyone ever really found happiness in the Catholic Mass?

Not for the first time, it occurs to Alyssa that going to Mass feels a lot like hooking up with those guys she dated before she found Emma -- something that works for some people, so she's told, but definitely not for her.

_To you, therefore, most merciful Father, we make humble prayer and petition through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord: that you accept –_

There’s a pause there, as the priest makes some sign or other with his hands; Alyssa’s still got her head bent. The word _accept_ echoes in her head, and she closes her eyes briefly, trying to believe it. Is there a God somewhere who could accept her? Does it matter if God accepts her, as long as her mom won’t? Alyssa can just see her in her peripheral vision, her lips moving silently along with the words of the liturgy. She has her rosary beads wrapped around her knotted-together fingers, the pearl-gray marble beads worn smooth over the years. It’s a set that Alyssa’s father’s mother had given to Alyssa’s mom when she converted to Catholicism before marrying him. They could have gone back to her mom’s evangelical roots after he left, but her mom has insisted on staying in the Catholic church. Alyssa figures it’s mostly because he took off without getting an annulment, meaning that in this church, her dad and her mom are still married. It doesn’t really matter, anyway. Catholics and evangelicals may have their differences, but they’re pretty united on the subject of dykes.

Alyssa winces away from the word, which has been occurring to her more often lately. For the longest time she hadn’t had any words to give to her experience at all: infatuations with this girl or that had flitted through her life, but she’d told herself sternly that it was normal, that all girls felt that way, that it was just friendship, just wanting to be close to someone who might understand her. That it was perfectly ordinary and heterosexual to spend her nights dreaming of caressing Kaylee’s face or running her hands through Pia’s hair. That she only noticed the curves and planes of their bodies in contrasting them to her own, the way all teenage girls do. That dreams were just dreams. None of it meant anything. She wasn’t like that. How could she be? Her life had been mapped out for her long before she’d had anything to say about it, and _gay_ was not on the map. For a very long time, Alyssa had assumed that her mother knew her better than she knew herself, and that all she had to do –- all she could do -- was let her mom tell her who she was.

Then along came Emma, and everything had changed. Alyssa feels a warmth begin to glow inside of her when she thinks of Emma, the ache in her knees receding, her pulse beating faster through her pressed-together fingertips. Emma, who’d been assigned to be her partner in a civics class debate project. Other pairs had been assigned to debate hot-button topics – capital punishment, the validity of the Electoral College. Emma and Alyssa had been assigned to debate whether or not the US Mint should retire pennies from circulation. Emma was assigned to be pro-penny, Alyssa anti-. Alyssa couldn’t have come up with a subject she cared about less, but she did her research dutifully, procuring stats on how much more a penny cost to produce than it was worth, the declining rates of cash purchase in the United States, the number of other countries that had already ceased producing pennies with no negative impact. Then she watched Emma’s mouth as she talked about rounding taxes and impacts on low-income Americans and lost track of most of what she’d meant to say. She saw a glint enter Emma’s eyes as Alyssa stumbled through her half of the presentation, repeating certain facts and forgetting others and hyper-aware of the way that the light hit Emma’s hair as it fell just behind her ear. They were given three minutes to argue with each other directly and all Alyssa knew was that Emma’s voice was quiet but vibrant with energy and the look in her eyes was bright and challenging and just the slightest bit mischievous, and her cheeks began to flush as she argued more heatedly and by the end of the three minutes Alyssa was barely aware that the rest of the class was there. Alyssa lost the debate, a little over half of the class voting -- despite Alyssa's popularity -- to keep the penny in circulation, and under any other circumstances she’d have been humiliated and terrified that her mom would find out, but on that day all she wanted was to sit down and stare at the short waves of Emma’s hair two rows ahead and one seat over, where Emma couldn’t see her staring.

At the end of class she’d gathered up her books in a daze, and been heading for the door when Emma fell into step beside her. “Good debate,” Emma had said.

“No, it wasn’t,” Alyssa said, without thinking, and then felt her cheeks catch fire. “I mean, it was for you. You… you were really good. I was lousy.”

“No, you weren’t,” Emma said, and then she’d reached for Alyssa’s hand. Alyssa froze, staring dumbly at her fingers, feeling the softness of Emma’s touch and then something cool against her skin. “No hard feelings?” Emma said. She flipped Alyssa’s hand over, and Alyssa saw what she’d nestled into her palm: a penny.

Alyssa had no words at all, just a dazzled smile. Emma’s fingers flicked over her palm one more time before she withdrew them. Alyssa closed her hand around the penny, so tightly she could feel the tiny ridges of Abe Lincoln’s head. Later she found it was a 2016 penny, still shiny with newness. She read the inscriptions like she could read her future in them. _United States of America. One Cent. E pluribus unum._ She wasn’t sure what that last bit meant. She thought it might mean _I am fathoms-deep in love with Emma Nolan._

The next day in class, two students had debated whether there should be a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The student arguing for it had been smug, the student arguing against diffident and embarrassed. The debate itself hadn’t gotten too bad, but there had been ugly comments from the class. Alyssa had felt like she was in a state of shock; twenty-four hours before she’d lost her heart to the girl sitting two rows away and now the entire class was talking about it, about her, personally, how perverted she was and how she ought to be banned by law. She’d been reduced to staring wide-eyed, hoping no one could read her heart on her face, when Emma had raised a hand. The teacher ignored her, calling on other students and trying to settle things down, clearly regarding Emma as a powder keg from which she’d better hide the matches, and Emma’s hand stayed up, and finally one of the other kids had used the word _homos_ and Emma had risen out of her seat, standing silently with her hand still raised high. The teacher looked over at her then, and sighed, and Emma took advantage of the moment of silence to speak out. “Mrs. Evans,” she’d said, “I’m not comfortable with my civil rights being treated as a matter for public debate.”

There had been a moment of silence, punctuated by a few scattered sniggers. Mrs. Evans had smiled uneasily. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Emma,” she’d said after a moment. “It’s just a debate topic, nothing personal –”

“It _is_ personal,” Emma had said, her voice high but clear. “It’s my life.”

“Maybe there’s something you can learn from –”

Emma had walked out of the room.

Alyssa had ached to follow her, but had kept her seat. But that night, at two in the morning, she finally sent the email that she’d drafted and redrafted and deleted and started again twenty-five times over the course of the evening. For several drafts the subject line had said _Thank you._ Eventually she changed it to _You were right._ Eleven drafts later she clicked Send. Then she went to her outbox and deleted it, and then she went to her trash and deleted that, and then she had a panic attack. _How can I have sent that, how can I have said all that, how can I have done that how can I have been like that how can I be like this how can I –_

Seven minutes later a reply came in. The first line said _Thank you._ The last line contained Emma’s phone number. The next afternoon Alyssa had called her, and they’d talked for three hours.

That had been over a year ago. It had taken a long time, so long, for them to come together, for the yearning in Alyssa’s heart to overcome the fear long enough for a first kiss. Emma had been kinder and more decent than Alyssa could ever have imagined, had always let Alyssa take things at her own pace, had talked her through panic attacks and held her through her terror – terror of her mom finding out, but even more, terror of being this person with huge messy desires spilling out all over the place. Emma had been the first person ever to tell Alyssa she was perfect exactly as she was. When she said it Alyssa could almost believe it, for a second or two at a time.

She did so much for Alyssa, and Alyssa felt that she herself did so little for Emma. But she couldn’t miss the longing in Emma’s voice when Emma would talk about the way ordinary kids got to live, how the world smiled on them as they went on dates and fell in love and held hands and kissed in public. How she wanted, just once, to be able to live that way.

Alyssa had found herself twining her fingers together the first time that subject had come up, so tightly that her nails bit into her skin. “You’re already out,” she said awkwardly.

Emma shook her head. “It’s not about that. I mean, it is, but it’s more than that. Being out – you know I’d never, ever want to go back,” she said, a little pointedly, and Alyssa looked down at her hands again. “But it’s lonely. I’m tired of walking down the hallways alone, getting pointed at and whispered about and flying solo the whole time. I don’t want my identity to be this huge issue. I just want…” Her voice trailed off. 

She didn’t finish the sentence, not then. But Alyssa knew perfectly well what she wanted. She wanted Alyssa to be out. She wanted them to be out together.

So Alyssa had come up with the plan for the prom.

The prom was three weeks away now, and Alyssa still had no idea what she was going to do. It was easy when she was with Emma, seeing the joy in Emma’s eyes at the thought of them dancing together. It was easy to get carried away with that thought, just the two of them in the center of a room full of people, and nothing mattering but each other. It was easy to make promises then, to _believe_ those promises then. But as soon as she’s away from Emma –

“ _Alyssa!”_ She jumps at the hissing voice in her ear, at the elbow that’s just landed in her side. “ _Move,”_ her mother whispers, and she realizes that she’s still at mass, still kneeling with her head bowed, and the rest of the pew is pushing toward the aisle, trying to get in the line for Communion. She bites her lip and slides down hastily in the familiar, awkward position that comes of trying to walk sideways with her feet between the pew and the kneeler. The line is slow; this priest, a little full of himself, makes a point of holding the wafer aloft for a moment before each communicant, enunciating rather than mumbling through the pronouncement of “The body of Christ.” Alyssa looks down at her shoes, decorously clad in black patent leather, shuffling down the aisle. This is meant to be the most important moment of all, the _mystery of faith_ , but it’s a mystery that’s been shrouded from her eyes. What can it mean, to take the body of Christ? What can it have meant that he ever had a body at all? Alyssa looks down over her own body, the body that she knows is supposed to be her weakness – isn’t lesbianism, after all, a “sin of the flesh”? But she could deal with that, the idea that her body wants something that’s wrong for it, the idea that she has to subdue her body’s desires. She’s been familiar with that concept since the day her mother started making her weigh in each night before supper. What she doesn’t understand is how she can have been given a heart whose longings are so desperate and so askew. This God of Christianity, this Lord of all creation – isn’t she his creation as well? Was she created wrong? And if she was, how can it be that Emma is the first right thing she’s ever known?

Inching forward down the aisle, she finally steps up to the open space in front of the priest. “The body of Christ,” he proclaims, and places the wafer in her hands. She places it on her tongue – dry, tasteless, barely substantial, the same as always. “Amen,” she whispers, and shuffles to the side. She walks back down the side aisle, trying to find some kind of meaning, any meaning at all, in the feeling of the wafer crumbling on her tongue. As usual, there’s nothing.

There’s probably some kind of God out there somewhere, Alyssa’s ready enough to acknowledge that. Something that’s watching her in this moment as she walks down this aisle, prim and stiff, estranged from herself. Something that watches her with Emma, too, relaxed and laughing and at peace. She has a second’s flash, just a bare second’s, as the wafer melts to nothing on her tongue and absorbs into her own body, when she feels that no God in His right mind could look at her in those two moments and prefer her in the first rather than the second.

But then she’s back kneeling in the pew again, and her mother is crowding in close beside her, nudging her to move down a bit further. She can feel her mother’s eyes on her, and her gaze is so much more real than anything she’s ever felt from God. She thinks of her mother’s eyes and how they’ll look if Alyssa turns up at prom with Emma, and pain stabs through her. She closes her eyes and sees two faces: Emma’s, lit up with joy, and her mother’s, creased in hatred. She wonders how she’s ever supposed to decide between them.

She prays, but she’s too used to prayer to expect any answer here.


End file.
